I think Flex has done a very wise thing in publishing this. It gives the entire enterprise from coder to customer a very clear vision and expectation. In the past Flex has under promised and over delivered, but in many respects as the road map was delivered upon Flex just delivered on road map items sooner than anticipated. This release is a couple weeks late and for good reason. It took a heck of a lot of work to get this out the door as a high quality product.
I'm on the Alpha team and all I can say is Whew!! We spent the entire past couple of weeks beating the heck out of the software so you could enjoy the experience, and I think we were very successful
Profiles:
This one took a heck of a lot of work but its here
This is the profiles dropdown on the title bar of SSDR. I created 4 memories in this profile. Virtually everything in the radio is remembered in the Global Profile. Here is an example.
This is a mess of a slice. The waterfall is screwed up, the offset is wrong, the keyer is too slow the NB and APF are off, the filter is too wide etc. Then I click the 14100 entry in profiles
AS Emeril Lagasse says BAM!! Everything is changed to the way I like to operate CW
Software update no problem You can import/export your profiles and store them on your computer.
I found you needed to do a purple light reboot to clear the database in the radio prior to importing a saved profile. That means you hold down the boot button until the light turns from green to purple and then release and let the radio boot up, then do the import. I made 2 different profiles for testing purposes. In addition the transmit profile is stored with the global profile so if you hang out on say 3950 ESSB net you can include your fancy ESSB profile in the 3950 entry.
Here is a shot of the transmit profile screen
CWX
This is SmartSDR's Keyboard/Memory Keyer
Click an voila'
You can type and hit enter or click live and just type and what you type will be sent immediately
It has memories
Just press F1 to F12. I presume at some point this will become API addressable so it can be used in conjunction with contest programs. I also presume more features are to be added in the future to better flesh out the keyer's capability. One thing I would like to see is an ability to link the keyer speed and the CWX speed so they are the same. Right now they are independent. Works good!!
Transverters
A new tab has been added to Radio Setup XVTR. Name the transverter and fill out the form
And it shows up in the exteded band switch
Click the button and voila'
I guess there is a way to Putty into the radio and make putty act like a transverter but I haven't tried that yet. I did use transverters with my Flex 5K and it was very easy to use. I don't have any transverters anymore, but the setup is clearly dead easy and should dramatically expand the utility of the radio. I'm sure there are ways to make various switches respond to switch transverters, amps and timing in and out. The freq band data and mode was correctly translated from the radio to DDUTIL to Commander which means all of the macro function od DDUTIL and DXLab is available
EME anyone?
Finally diversity was added but my radio does not have the second SCU needed for that so I have nothing to report on that front.
An amazing job was done by all and YOU are the winner!
73 W9OY
